Anchored by the early advances of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (now Voyages),Footnote ¹ much of the application of digital tools to historical research in and about Africa has been dominated by the creation and analysis of digital archives. And, of that, a disproportionate amount of the scholarship has addressed the methodological questions associated with the study of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.Footnote ² Importantly, these archival projects placed Africanists at the center of DH debates about data sourcing, representation, analysis, and access.

Particularly in light of persistent challenges to processing and preserving archival materials on the continent, digital archiving projects are likely to increase in number in the foreseeable future, and forthcoming issues of this journal will once again take up questions of digital archives. The papers presented here, however, feature projects that explore other possibilities of digital scholarship. In particular, many historians have also begun embracing the possibilities of the digital not merely to archive but also to create what Theimer calls “digital historical representations.”Footnote ³ While these projects often include some form of archiving, they also take a step beyond the digitized archive, using digital sources to create interactive historical experiences and make historical arguments. In doing so, these scholars are part of a long tradition in Africanist scholarship, which embraces new methodological practices to rethink what it means to “do history.”

Some of these projects use existing digital technologies – from “mining” social media to blogging to historical mapping – to bring new voices and perspectives into the popular and scholarly conversation about the African past. Others use their projects as platforms for new kinds of sensory and spatial analysis in historical scholarship, and, in the process, are often creating new kinds of technology and software that make their analysis possible. Still others are dedicated to rethinking how we teach African history, both inside and outside of the continent. At a time when the Economist argues, “mobile phones are transforming Africa,” these digital projects provide a new way for scholars to engage with a broad-based public.Footnote ⁴ Public-facing projects not only encourage citizens to consume material on their sites, but, in many cases, they also actively encourage people to participate in building their content and analysis.

These projects are all informed by the methodological, technological, and ethical considerations raised by earlier digital scholarship, as well as the debates about decolonization and intersectionality that are reshaping both African Studies and Digital Humanities.Footnote ⁵ By engaging in public scholarship, these digital history projects help rethink long-standing concerns among Africanist scholars about the politics of knowledge production and the repatriation of scholarly materials. These projects are often highly collaborative and involve partnerships within and outside of the continent. However, they also raise new kinds of concerns about access, privilege, and representation. The high costs of these projects mean that they are often funded through US and European institutions, replicating a model of research support on the continent more broadly. But digital projects also require server space and hosting, as well as ongoing web maintenance to stay active – support that often requires additional investment and support. While South African universities have been building their own digital humanities infrastructure over the last several years, digital humanities centers are currently heavily concentrated in the US and Europe.Footnote ⁶ New centers opening in Nigeria face ongoing funding and resource challenges, which inhibit digital scholarship.

Even as digital scholarship on and in Africa expands, it often seems disconnected from both the scholarly commitments and digital communities of those on and off of the continent. As the 2019 Digital Humanities Conference’s “focus on Africa” made clear, conversations about DH in Africa are still unduly focused on the kinds of capacity building that leads to the development of DH centers, institutes, and programs, while ignoring more fundamental questions of representation, inclusion, and access.Footnote ⁷ What does it mean to develop digital humanities programs on a continent where internet costs are higher and speeds are slower than global averages?Footnote ⁸ What does digital humanities look like in countries where individuals are far more likely to access the internet via mobile phones than broadband hookups?Footnote ⁹ As the projects presented here make clear, these conditions do not preclude the development of digital humanities projects in African contexts. They do, however, raise questions about the biases of funding structures, the limitations of institution-building, and the importance of community engagement and partnerships.

These papers, then, are not intended to represent the breadth and complexity of the field of Africanist digital history, if we could call it such. It is, however, instructive to think about what they do represent. These projects are three examples of an emerging form of engagement in the digital humanities among Africanists; they are new forms of digital historical representation, community engagement, and academic research that blur the boundaries between public history, digital humanities, and more traditional forms of historical scholarship. Two of these three projects have been developed outside of major digital humanities centers, driven by the research and pedagogical interests of individual faculty members and graduate students. They are part of an emerging conversation about public-facing scholarship and applied history as much as they are about digital humanities.Footnote ¹⁰ And, importantly, they provide us with accessible and thoughtful models for how to use digital tools to produce knowledge, disseminate research, analyze data, preserve historical materials, and engage the public, which could be incorporated into many different classrooms and research agendas.

If these papers are not intended to constitute a representative sample of the field, it is also important to think about what is left out and how this is shaped by the networks and institutional definitions that have come to dominate digital humanities broadly and digital history specifically. Some of the most interesting and publicly-engaged projects on the continent have been created and are operating outside of academic networks, driven by the efforts of young Africans to document, learn from, and celebrate the past. In Ghana, for example, The Nana Project encourages individuals to become citizen historians by collecting oral histories from community elders in order to preserve and expand knowledge of the nation’s recent history. Other projects like Accra We Dey are not explicitly historical but they do draw heavily on history to raise awareness of the cultural and historical richness of Accra’s indigenous Ga community. These kinds of projects often blur the boundaries between commercial and academic, entrepreneurial and philanthropic, private projects and public interest. They often rely heavily on social media, and they are connected to broader networks within their respective countries and throughout the diaspora. And yet, they remain largely excluded from institutionalized academic conversations and networks in the digital humanities.

In thinking about what these three papers include and what they exclude, then, we can see the emergence of what might be a critical agenda for Digital History in African Studies. What does such a field look like? What kinds of questions should we be asking ourselves in order to ensure that digital scholarship is used in such a way that we can expand access rather than limit it? What kinds of issues are raised when digital scholarship is practiced in an African context that might otherwise be overlooked in broader digital humanities conversations and networks? What happens when historical questions are separated out from inherently interdisciplinary projects? And where/how can we write about the methodological considerations at the core of this broad range of Africanist digital scholarship that include non-academic practitioners and engage both African Studies and Digital Humanities audiences?